Can we get a cable in there?
October 2026
Someone in the largescale residential development game once told me that 20 years ago there were two things which never appeared on the agenda for a board meeting of a largescale house builder; health & safety and electrical connections. Putting aside high-vis jackets, I can comment on electrical connections.
Whether it’s largescale housing, strategic land for commercial development, a new data centre campus or even a pretty simple 16 unit open market development, power and access to power is the choke point on a lot of developments in the UK.
Some of these projects, especially data centres, can afford to look at very long cable routes to bring in power from a substation (in some cases 20km plus) that has the capacity to power their development., Sadly in other instances, a delay of 5+ years and/or relatively modest electrical costs, say half a million pounds, is enough to sink some smaller scale residential developments.
Over the last 10 years we have done a lot of route identification and securing land rights for renewable projects. We now find ourselves turning this specialism towards strategic residential, commercial and data centre developments. This all starts from the developer being given an eye wateringly expensive, albeit still viable, connection from a substation a long way from their development. The cable then needs to be installed from points A to B. Some of this can be in the road, but that is expensive, and it may be cheaper if we can do a soft dig across third party land. There is the added complication that in some instances, road digs aren’t possible and a combination of third party landowners and/or a longer cable route in the road may be the only answer.
Who owns the land? Will they do a deal? What statutory rights does the acquiring party have? Do they have any? How do we get on the land to do surveys? And how much will the landowner need for us to get a cable in there? These are all questions that we face on a day to day basis. So, when a developer client asks us, can we get a cable in there? The answer is possibly but (no pun intended) we’ll need to do some digging……
